sxswedu

A Call for Innovation (SXSWedu)

Posted by on March 5, 2013 in Uncategorized

Thanks to everyone who attended my Future 15 talk at SXSWedu today. Below is the slidedeck. (I’ll be adding audio by the weekend if you want to share with others.) I’ve also included links to some of the things I talked about below. Drop me a line if you’d like to chat more.

PPT file here

Paul Allison’s work – Youth Voices Play and at P2PU (all linked from Youth Voices as well)
PhET (interactive simulations)
FreeReading (reading intervention) and remixed versions (ebooks and Voicethreads)
Hippocampus (online courses)
CK12 (online textbooks, Flexbooks)
Curriki
P2PU School of Ed

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Let’s Build a Collaborative Learning Space

Posted by on March 10, 2012 in Uncategorized

At SXSWedu this year, I was slated to do a hands-on session to brainstorm what makes a good collaborative learning space with strong peer learning and to begin building such a thing. The goal was to get people thinking about peer learning, to introduce them to P2PU, and to see what they came up with.

I am often not very good as fostering hands-on collaboration in a conference setting, especially when people don’t know each other. Other challenges included that this session was only an hour long and that the room was set up auditorium style with rows of seats and a podium upfront on a stage.

Despite these challenges, this session went great. Here’s what we did, what went well, and what didn’t. Thanks much to Philipp Schmidt who helped brainstorm and facilitate this.

Brief discussion of what we did: I talked for about 10 minutes, introducing the idea of peer learning and P2PU. I told people they’d be getting into groups (or they could work individually if they wanted) to brainstorm tasks for a peer learning group on ___. I gave them some suggested topics:

  • How can we make our classrooms more student-driven?
  • How can mobile devices be used for learning?
  • How can Twitter be used for professional learning?
  • How can we build a digital curriculum?
  • …or create your own topic

I said they could brainstorm and/or develop on paper, in a Google Doc (in which I had set up areas for each group in advance), or in P2PU. I asked people to self-group and asked for a volunteer for notetaker from each group. See below for the slides and handout I used.

Then the rest of the time was hands on. At the end of the hour, animated conversation was still going on, and I was told not to interrupt them!

What worked well:

  • At the beginning of the session, I said “This is going to be a very hands on session. If that isn’t your thing, feel free to leave.” (Maybe 2 of 45 people left. I don’t know what I’d have done if 40+ left.)
  • Giving prompts for groups was mentioned as something that people liked. Everyone pretty easily grouped around 3 of the 4 topics I suggested. (We dropped one.)
  • Giving choices both in topic choice, group/individual, and where to brainstorm was well received.
  • Three people volunteered to be notetakers. Excellent participation!
  • People rearranged the room for groupwork. Here’s what it looked like:
    group1
  • The Google Doc worked excellently. Here are the results. I don’t think anyone used paper or P2PU (which I figured was too ambitious for this purpose). There is something magic about using a shared Google Doc for this kind of thing – it has worked for me f2f and online and even with the most reluctant groups. Best of all, now I have captured their great thinking for further iteration.

What I might do differently next time:

  • Talk even less at the beginning.
  • Define additional roles beyond notetaker within each group.
  • Don’t have handouts. The were unnecessary.
  • Would be nice to have more time to do reports out and possibly some group discussion and iteration.

I got everyone’s emails from this session to follow up. I am certain that we will collaborate further on these ideas and that you’ll see them in future P2PU School of Ed groups.

Slides I used:

Handouts

groups2

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SXSWedu and OER!

Posted by on February 20, 2012 in Uncategorized

logo

SXSWedu is featuring a bunch of great OER sessions this year! Here’s a quick list of ones to check out.

Tuesday, March 6

10:15am – 11:15am – Hilton Rm 400/402 – Create Something from the StoryBox – Alan Levine

10:15am – 11:15am – Hilton Rm 406 – Moving Beyond Textbooks: OER in Support of K-12 Ed – Jason Neiffer

11:30am – 12:30pm – Hilton Rm 406 – $5 Open Textbooks in High School Science Classes – David Wiley

2:00pm – 3:00pm – Hilton Rm 406 – Educating Everyone: What Next for Open Education? – Larry Cooperman

2:00pm – 3:00pm – Hilton Salon D – Implementing Open Educational Resources in K12 – Jeff Mao, Pam Buffington

2:00pm – 3:00pm – Hilton Salon C – The Power of Open: Creative Commons Licensing and its Impact – Cathy Casserly

3:15pm – 4:15pm – Hilton Rm 406 – OER: Share, Remix, Learn – Karen Fasimpaur

Wednesday, March 7

9:00am – 10:00am – Hilton Rm 406 – Making OER that is Easy to Find, Adapt & Translate – Katherine Fletcher

10:15am – 11:15am – Hilton Rm 406 – Let’s Build a Collaborative Learning Space – Karen Fasimpaur * Hands on – Bring your own device

11:30am – 12:30pm – Hilton Rm 400/402 – How Digital Content Fosters Customized Learning – Neeru Khosla

11:30am – 12:30pm – Hilton Rm 406 – The Future is Now: Mobile Open Education Resources – Sandy Khaund

2:00-3:00 – Hilton Rm 406 – Integrating OER into a Strong Instructional Model – Lindsay Bellino, Marc Nelson

3:15pm – 4:15pm – Hilton Rm 406 – Developing a Culture of Sharing – Philipp Schmidt, Karen Fasimpaur, Alan Levine, Jim Groom

Thursday, March 8

9:00am – 10:00am – Hilton Rm 406 – Is Open Content the Future of K-12 Education? David Wiley, Larry Rosenstock, Louise Waters, Neeru Khosla

10:15am – 11:15am – Hilton Rm 406 – Employing OER Evaluation Tools – Jennifer Childress, Lisa McLaughlin

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